Joomla! – Support and Service

Joomla is often thought of as the compromise between WordPress and Drupal. Joomla! is another award-winning content management system (CMS) to build Web sites and powerful online web applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, made Joomla! one of the more popular web site and application development platforms available a few years ago.

Joomla! is part of the open source community and their source code is freely accessible and can be modified under their license. Joomla!’s roots go back to 2000, and with over 200,000 community users and contributors, the future looked bright for Joomla!.

Ah, The Love/Hate…

While Joomla used to be one of the more popular open source CMS available, it is no longer one of our favorites…

We do a lot more fix and repair and support for those customers currently having Joomla! as their web CMS. If a customer or prospect has an old version and experiences issues, we lean more towards directing them to WordPress and Drupal if “the juice is not worth the squeeze” to repair their current Joomla! implementation.

In Our Opinion, Joomla might be Dying!

Between Drupal and WordPress – WordPress being our favorite for most common web sites, most bases are covered with regards to security, longevity, scalability, and features. This means that before even considering the drawbacks of Joomla!, there really is no necessity for it in the market any longer.

Many plugins for Joomla must be paid for and are no longer supported, potentially due to the low user base. This generally causes the community to not favor the use of such modules, which has also depreciated in the past few years and led to many migrations to either Drupal or WordPress. This results in a smaller Joomla community, which is infrequently ideal for an open source platform.

Joomla! is also generally less secure than WordPress and Drupal, and the way upgrades are handled from one major release to the next can be very frustrating. Major version releases are really forks to the last version and require more of a migration than an upgrade. Moreover, the site theme and extensions used on the previous version are often incompatible with the new version, which means you have to invest much more time, money, and energy when performing what should be a simple upgrade.

But It Ain’t All that Bad…

Joomla still remains a powerful content management system, which can run smoothly on most web servers without any problems. It doesn’t require the same level of technical experience as Drupal, and it still offers many extra features. Like Drupal and WordPress, Joomla has a lot of plug-ins and themes available to choose from. So we can customize your site to look and function in any way you desire. Other reasons to choose Joomla include:

Social Networking – This is one of the biggest benefit of Joomla. Joomla makes it the easiest to create social networks. Social networks can be a powerful asset for many sites, and with Joomla, you can have one up and running extremely quickly and easily, especially with our help.

Commerce Sites – If you want us to set up an online e-commerce store; this is also very simple with Joomla. While it is certainly possible with Drupal and WordPress, Joomla can make it a “tad” faster and easier, and offers more native support for these types of things.

Not too Technical – Joomla has, in many people’s opinion, found that middle ground between the ease of managing a WordPress website, and the power of a Drupal site. Most common folk should be able to run a Joomla site without any significant technical support (cough-cough), though there may be some issues which you’ll need our help on.

Help Portal – Joomla offers a great help portal for asking questions and getting technical support. It isn’t going to be as fast or extensive as the community based support pages of WordPress, but it is quicker (and cheaper) than technical support most people get for Drupal.

Free – Like Drupal, Joomla is free to use on your own web servers, but there is no option to have it hosted for free like WordPress offers.

Many Joomla users love Joomla because it is powerful, yet easy to use. Joomla has done an excellent job at combining the benefits of WordPress and Drupal, and adding in some great features of its own. Joomla seems to have found a big market of people who are ready for something a little more powerful than WordPress, but easier to manage than Drupal.